History
The Auckland Gas Company was formed in 1862 as the first joint stock company in New Zealand. It was also the first private services provider in Auckland. In the 1870s, the company bought and developed a large site in Freemans Bay to build a gasworks (roughly on and east of the site of the current New World supermarket), with further buildings (mainly workshops) and offices on Beaumont Street.
In the late 1960s the Kapuni gas fields were openened, providing natural gas which was cleaner and cheaper than the locally produced coal gas variant, and the company stopped producing gas and became a supplier only. This led to most of the buildings in the Freemans Bay are being demolished.
Read more about this topic: Auckland Gas Company
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)